Anthropologists want to rethink ST identification criteria.

• Top anthropologists in India are advocating for a shift in defining a “tribe” based on a “spectrum of tribalness”.
• The consensus reached at the Indian Anthropology Congress was that a community’s classification should be assessed on a “spectrum of tribalness” rather than a binary question of whether it is a tribe.
• Hundreds of communities across India are demanding inclusion in the list of Scheduled Tribes to access benefits such as reservation in education, jobs, and governmental aid.
• The Union government’s criteria for classifying communities as Scheduled Tribe are deemed “condescending”, “obsolete”, “derogatory”, and “meaningless”.
• The idea is to build a tool to assess the ‘tribalness’ of the community, aligning with constitutional mandates and aiding tribal research institutions in preparing ethnographic reports for policymaking.
• The new scale to define tribes in India will consider a host of characteristics, potentially up to 150 indicators.
• The focus is now on social institutions such as marriage, kinship, family classification, rituals in practice, language, and the “materiality of cultural indicators”.
• The tool will also account for how communities like to see themselves, moving from an “evolutionary” approach to a more “historical or civilisational” approach.